Kafka Streams - Part 2

May 7, 2017. Estimated read time:
5 minutes

This is Part 2 of the blog on Kafka Streams, in the previous blog Hello Kafka Streams, we built a simple stream processing application using Kafka Streams Library. In this blog, we will continue exploring more features in Kafka Streams by building a bit more involved application which explains the use of flatMapValues, branch, predicate, selectKey, through, join and also see how to create a custom SerDe using Kryo. All the code used in this blog can be found in my Github.

In this post, our input will be a stream of ClimateLog messages which will be of the format <country, state, temperature, humidity>. We will be creating a streaming application that has the below topology.

climate_events is a topic where we receive the ClimateLog messages in String format. These raw messages are parsed into case class ClimateLog.

Note that all messages in Kafka should have a Key and a Value. If we do not pass a key during ingestion through KafkaConsoleProducer, it will be null.

branch

Branch creates multiple branches from a single stream. It takes in Varargs of Predicates and produces a KStream of each Predicate. Each element in the source KStream is applied against each Predicate and the element is assigned to the KStream corresponding to the first Predicate that it matches. In our example, we will create two predicates one for highHumidity and the other for lowTemp.

//define the predicates to split the stream into branches
valhighHumidty=newPredicate[String, ClimateLog]{overridedeftest(t:String,c:ClimateLog):Boolean=c.humidity>50}vallowTemp=newPredicate[String, ClimateLog]{overridedeftest(t:String,c:ClimateLog):Boolean=c.temperature<0}//array of streams for each predicate
valbranches=climateLogStream.branch(highHumidty,lowTemp)

through

Through persists the messages from a KStream to the given topic and creates a new KStream from that topic. This can be used if you want the intermediate result from the application to be made available to other application, but at the same time use the stream further downstream in the current application. We will persist lowTemp stream and highHumidity stream to 2 new topics - low_temp and high_humidity.

Note that the Value serializer is a custom Kryo based serializer for ClimateLog, which we will be creating next.

kryo serializer

The serializer needs to implement org.apache.kafka.common.serialization.Serde. Serde has mainly two methods - serializer() and deserializer() which return instance of Serializer and Deserializer. Kafka expects this class to have an empty constructor. So, we will create a class ClimateLogSerDe which extends ClimatelogWrappedSerde class, which takes the Serializer and Deserializer as arguments in it’s constructor. We also create ClimateLogSerializer and ClimateLogDeserializer which uses ClimateLogKryoSerDe as default serializer. The implementation is bit lengthy, please check the github page for complete code.

selectKey

The streams we have till now does not have a key (assuming you are using KafkaConsoleProducer and is not passing a key). selectKey selects a key using the KeyValueMapper provided and creates a new stream from the existing stream. We create two streams from highHumdityStream and lowTempStream by choosing value.country as the key.

join

Next, we join the highHumidity stream and lowTemperature stream to create a new stream called warnings. The two streams will be joined based on the key - which in this case is the country. We should also define a join window,

//create a join window. This window joins all the elements of the same key if the difference between their timestamps is within 60 seconds
valjoinWindow=JoinWindows.of(60*1000)

Now join the streams using a ValueJoiner. A ValueJoiner defines what should be done when we find two values for the same key. In this example, we simply merge these two values by getting the temperature from low temp stream and humidity from high humidity stream.

We have already seen how to submit the job, how to create the topics(climate_events, high_humidity, low_temp, warnings) and how to send the message to these topics in the previous blog post, so I am not going to bore you with the same details :)

To summarize, we saw how to use various KafkaStreams APIs such as - branch, through, selectKey, join. We also created a custom serializer using Kryo. Hope this was useful and Thanks for reading!
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